Field note · November 4, 2024
Cutting a lesson down — Choosing the form before the colours
Most bad charts are bad because someone picked a chart type from a toolbar. The type should be decided by what the data is being asked to do.
A note from writing Choosing the form before the colours, which took three passes to get to something short.
Most bad charts are bad because someone picked a chart type from a toolbar. The type should be decided by what the data is being asked to do.
The hard part of writing this was cutting it. The first version covered every case; the useful version covers the case you hit on a Tuesday and names the rest in a sentence. Completeness is a property of reference material, not of teaching material, and confusing the two produces something nobody finishes.
It sits in the Showing the result module. The exercise is a thinking one rather than a query one — some of this material is about deciding what to compute, and that does not need a keyboard.
Ordering matters here more than in most courses. It follows When not to build a model and leads into Colour is an encoding, not decoration, and reading it out of sequence mostly works but costs you the setup.
Free means free, and it also means we can rewrite it whenever it is wrong. No edition, no errata PDF, nothing to repurchase. The whole course is 36 lessons and the fixes land the day we find them.